It was sometime before 2010 that my dreams of windmills and solar panels were dashed. I saw a headline proclaiming something like “for the first time wind and solar have become cheaper than coal for generating electricity.” I was surprised, more than 15 years ago, by that awesome news, but I wanted to know more about this wonderful turn-around, so I started reading the article.
Turned out, the devil in the details was that the headline should have began, “With a 95% subsidy…” What the article with the misleading headline was in fact reporting was that, with a 95% subsidy, the remaining 5% of the cost of wind&solar was comparable to the cost of the same KWh of capacity for a coal-fired generating station.
Or, put another way, wind&solar capacity was, in fact, TWENTY times as costly as coal capacity. However, thinking about this today, I have realized that it is much worse than that. If you take capacity factor into account, you could increase that figure anything from 1–6 again. Although CF varies dramatically by location and by year.
And just yesterday, almost two decades later, I was hearing the same sorts of ludicrous claims, that melt under the slightest scrutiny. Including the one where wind&solar, which in fact contribute a trivial 6% of the world’s energy, are growing exponentially. You just cannot see the exponential growth. But if we just continue to not start building real sources of grid-scale low-carbon energy for another 30 years, then the ‘bird’ will “have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!” Fwee energy.
But the reality is, “Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it!”
And I swear by the Great goddess Asherah I would love to be wrong. I would love for the mathematically challenged delusions of wind&solar advocates to be a path to a sustainable future. But it happens every bleedin time that when they make a glorious hopeful claim, it turns out that they nailed it to the perch.
